Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Research is building a computational knowledge engine called Wolfram|Alpha for the web to be launched in May 2009. The product will contain data in various fields including physical sciences, technology, geography, weather, cooking, business, music, etc. in order to provide answers to questions that users input. Its language interface will accommodate variations in how users frame their questions, such as the use of abbreviations. Wolfram Alpha’s vision is to create a system which can do for formal knowledge (heuristics, algorithms, rules, methods, theorems, etc.) what search engines like Google have done for informal knowledge, such as text and documents.